Bummer Babies, and Everyone Else: New York Explains It All

It has come to the attention of New York magazine that even if people “love” their kids, they also find them annoying a lot of the time.Why do parents hate parenting? demands today’s cover story.

A condensed version of the magazine’s rationale for why kids make us unhappy:

- They do not do what one says. Rather, one must do what they say: “Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses.”

- Are a big hassle and leave one with little leisure time: “I ask what she does on the weekends her ex-husband has custody. ‘I work,’ she replies. ‘And get my nails done.'”

- Intensify one’s fierce desire to WIN, causing stress: “When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business”

- Have to talk to them all the time: “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children, answering questions with questions, and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution. And this is very tiring work.”

- Seem like they’re going to be so great then inevitably disappoint: “‘There’s all this buildup-as soon as I get this done, I’m going to have a baby, and it’s going to be a great reward!’ says Ada Calhoun, the author of Instinctive Parenting and founding editor-in-chief of Babble, the online parenting site. ‘And then you’re like, “Wait, this is my reward? This nineteen-year grind?”‘”

These are basically the problems we find ourselves having with other people in general. It heartens us to learn that babies are pretty much same-old, same-old.